Poor Africa: some bad news, and some advice

1. Congo: the results come in with a bang
Gun battles in the capital do not augur well for the next round of voting (from The Economist)

HE HAD to don a flak jacket and be ferried to the state television's studios in an armoured personnel carrier, but Father Apollinaire Malu Malu, the head of Congo's election commission, did eventually manage to announce the country's election results on August 20th, three weeks after polling. As expected, the incumbent president, Joseph Kabila, was far ahead of his rivals. But his 44.8% of the vote was not enough to win in the first round, so he will have to face Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former Ugandan-backed rebel and one of Congo's four current vice-presidents, in a run-off in October.

The results, however, became something of a sideshow as running gun battles took over the heart of Congo's capital for the following two days. The dispute started as a stand-off between Mr Bemba and Mr Kabila's bodyguards at the party headquarters of the president's bitter rival, but escalated into a battle between their private armies. Congo's police proved impotent as Mr Kabila's presidential guard brought tanks onto the streets and soldiers armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades fought Mr Bemba's red-bandana-clad men.

Both sides blamed the other for the fighting. The former rebel's men say Mr Kabila was angry at failing to win the election outright; the presidency accuses Mr Bemba of provoking the violence by bringing armed men into his riverside house, just down the road from Mr Kabila's office.

Mr Kabila seems to have come out of it all looking worse. At one point, his men attacked Mr Bemba's house while the head of the UN peacekeeping mission and most of Kinshasa's diplomatic corps were inside trying to fix a ceasefire. Only after a short truce was agreed were the envoys packed into armoured UN vehicles and taken to safety. No one was betting on how long another truce, brokered on August 22nd, would hold. The two leaders were yet to meet but their commanders had agreed to withdraw their troops and life in the capital was returning to normal.

Much damage, however, has been done. Several people were killed and many wounded. Fearing more violence, the European Union, which together with the UN did most to organise the election, has flown in at least 200 German and Dutch reinforcements. They may be needed, though probably not in Kinshasa's leafy diplomatic district where the fighting took place, so much as in poorer districts where rival supporters will be fired up by commentaries from television stations belonging to the two candidates.

There are already reports of attacks on Mr Kabila's supporters and fellow easterners. The poll on July 30th, the culmination of a three-year transition to democracy after a war that claimed up to 4m lives, passed off relatively well. But voting was largely on ethnic and linguistic lines, with the Swahili-speaking east voting for Mr Kabila and the Lingala-speaking west largely rejecting him. The two front-runners will now try to secure the support of those who backed candidates now eliminated, notably the veteran Antoine Gizenga, who came third with 13% of the vote.

The hope is that this latest battle has not doomed the entire election. But many fear that more fighting is to come, even if Messrs Kabila and Bemba do agree to try to keep their rivalry peaceful.


2. DR Congo's dangerous run-off
The inconclusive result of the first round of the Democratic Republic of Congo's election is proving a test for its democratic path, reports Tristan McConnell in Bunia, northeast DRC.
By Tristan McConnell

Three hours late, the results in the Democratic Republic of Congo's first proper elections in forty-five years came through on the evening of Sunday 20 August . It was not the triumphant moment many Congolese, as well as many in the international community, had been waiting for. The chief of the independent electoral commission sat nervously before the cameras in a state-owned television studio in the capital, Kinshasa. There were no journalists there, no grand announcement, just a man and a list – and eventually the message that no one, not even the first-round frontrunner and incumbent president, Joseph Kabila , had won outright.

Outside, Kinshasa was in turmoil. Combative rhetoric between the two leading candidates – Kabila himself (whose electoral base is in the east of the country where his father Laurent had waged a long guerrilla struggle) and Jean-Pierre Bemba (a former close ally of ex-president Mobutu, who has strong support in Kinshasa) – defined the electoral campaign until the actual voting on 30 July ; their rivalry has continued to dominate the DRC's political scene in the weeks that followed, as each candidate declared himself victor.

The combustible atmosphere between them and their supporters finally erupted into real combat shortly before the results were announced, when the presidential guard loyal to Kabila fought it out in the streets with Bemba's personal bodyguards. United Nations sources say that the fighting , which lasted for several hours, left five people dead – though the total of all post-election incidents is likely to be significantly higher .

The violence led to the urgent reinforcement of the 1,000-strong rapid reaction force assigned to the DRC by the European Union, and already operating in support of the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in the country. A further sign of international concern was the UN's arrangement of a ceasefire between the Kabila and Bemba camps on 23 August.

This latest violence, in a country notorious for the ease with which its people are murdered by armed groups or drop dead from disease, casts a shadow over the results themselves in which the incumbent Kabila won 45% of the vote and Bemba 20%. The failure of Kabila to reach the 50% threshold necessary for outright victory means that the two men will go head-to-head in a presidential run-off on 29 October.

The other thirty candidates who stood for the presidency were way behind in the voting. Most were largely ignored by the 17-million Congolese who turned up to vote, but some achieved a respectable performance. In third place came Antoine Gizenga (13%), a veteran politician and dedicated follower of murdered independence-era prime minister Patrice Lumumba. In fourth position was Nzanga Mobutu (5%), the son of Mobutu Sese Seko, whose kleptocratic dictatorship was established in the aftermath of the assassination in January 1961 of the hero of Congolese independence from Belgium's vicious colonial rule, Patrice Lumumba .

In fifth was Oscar Kashala (3%), an academic from the diaspora who recently returned to Congo after years in the United States. He was followed by two eastern candidates , former rebel leader Azarias Ruberwa (2%) and Pierre Pay Pay (2%), who served as finance minister and central-bank governor under Mobutu.

Analysts argued before the results arrived that a presidential run-off would be the best option for maintaining the tenuous peace that currently holds in this huge country, the logic being that an outright victory for one candidate – presumed to be Kabila – would be violently disputed by the losers. A run-off, say the analysts, gives time for coalitions to be formed, new alliances to be struck and for tempers to cool.

A shadow over the future

It may not work that way. The violence of results day suggests that the coming campaign period is set to be tense, and weeks of hostile speeches may widen the gap between the series of related oppositions revealed in the elections: between east/west, Swahili/Lingala and Kabila/Bemba.

Eastern Congo suffered a brutal civil and regional war which, in waves between 1996 and 2004, was characterised by rape, displacement, invasion by neighbouring armies, murder and mutilation of civilians, the use of child soldiers and a concomitant spread of lethal diseases. It is estimated that 3.9 million people died during a conflict that has earned the sobriquet "Africa's first world war". Kabila is credited with ending the war and voters in the east have shown the 35-year old former soldier their gratitude by giving him a landslide victory.

While the east bore the brunt of that devastating conflict, the west was largely unscathed. Kabila's self-designation as La Pacificateur (the peacemaker) earns him little political capital here. His unpopularity is compounded by his sketchy grasp of Lingala, the main language of the west, while he is at ease with Swahili, spoken in the east. None of this goes down well with westerners, especially in Kinshasa. Kabila's opponents took advantage of this animosity to brand him a "foreigner" during the campaign period.

In the capital, Kabila was trounced by Jean-Pierre Bemba, a 43-year old former rebel leader and the son of a wealthy businessman who made his money during the thirty-two-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko . Bemba mounted a strong challenge to Kabila using his own money made during his years in business before he underwent military training and set up a rebel militia.

Bemba is wanted for war crimes committed in neighbouring Central African Republic – a case that has been referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In Congo he, along with his soldiers, is accused of heinous abuses. He has repeatedly had to deny allegations of cannibalism alongside the more common crimes of rape and murder.

The source of Bemba's popularity lies in his harnessing of nationalist fervour by portraying himself as "100% Congolese" in opposition to the "foreign" Kabila.

With voter turnout above the nationwide average in the east, Kabila will be unable to squeeze many more votes from there and will have to turn westwards to find the extra 5% that would give him victory in the run-off. Bemba, however, may find more votes in the west where turnout was far lower. He has to mobilise that dormant support, but he too may be forced to reach across the east/west divide if he hopes to add 30% to his tally in the next two months.

Ahead lie weeks of political horse-trading and deal-making as well as fractious campaigning across the country ahead of the second-round on 29 October. The dangers of regional schism and linguistic-ethnic polarisation highlighted by the inflammatory rhetoric of some of Bemba's supporters to the DRC's fragile democratic path are evident. But if Kabila and Bemba can continue to seek more second-round votes as electoral adversaries rather than as enemies across an unbridgeable dividing-line, the republic may yet have found a way out of the cycle of violence that has afflicted it for so long.

(Tristan McConnell is Uganda correspondent for Africa Confidential. He also writes about Uganda for British newspapers including the Independent and the Daily Telegraph.)


3. Africa Adds to Miserable Ranks of Child Workers -- by MICHAEL WINES (from NY Times)

LUSAKA, Zambia — The boulders here are hard enough that the scavengers who have taken over the abandoned quarry south of downtown prefer not to strike them directly with their hammers.

They heat the rocks first — with flaming tires, scrap plastic, even old rubber boots — so that the stones will fracture more easily.

At dusk, when three or four blazes spew choking black clouds across the huge pit, the quarry looks like a woodcut out of Dante.

A boy named Alone Banda works in this purgatory six days a week.

Nine years old, nearly lost in a hooded sweatshirt with a skateboarder on the chest, he takes football-size chunks of fractured rock and beats them into powder.

Lacking a hammer, he uses a thick steel bolt gripped in his right hand.

In a good week, he says, he can make enough powder to fill half a bag.

His grandmother, Mary Mulelema, sells each bag, to be used to make concrete, for 10,000 kwacha, less than $3. Often, she said, it is the difference between eating and going hungry.

“Sometimes when he’s tired, I tell him to stop, but he helps me here most of the time,” she said. “We work every day, to make that powder. Sometimes we work Sunday, if we don’t go to church.”

Across the globe, the number of children forced to work is in sharp decline.

But sub-Saharan Africa, in places like Lusaka and for children like Alone, is the exception. Here, more than one in four children below age 14 works, whether full time or for a few hours a week, nearly the same percentage as the worldwide average in 1960.

It is by far the greatest proportion of working children in the world.

By the United Nations ’ latest estimate, more than 49 million sub-Saharan children age 14 and younger worked in 2004, 1.3 million more than at the turn of the century just four years earlier.

Their tasks are not merely the housework and garden-tending common to most developing societies.

They are prostitutes, miners, construction workers, pesticide sprayers, haulers, street vendors, full-time servants, and they are not necessarily even paid for their labor.

Some are as young as 5 and 6 years old.

In Kenya, nearly a third of the coffee pickers were children, a 2001 World Bank Report found.

In Tanzania, 25,000 children worked in hazardous jobs on plantations and in mines.

Their numbers in Africa grow even as the ranks of child laborers are dropping by the millions in every other region of the world.

Child labor declines with prosperity, and so the region’s economic plight — 44 percent of sub-Saharan residents live on less than $1 a day, far and away the greatest share on earth — is a big reason.

But so are social mores that regard hard work by children as the norm, and conflicts that scatter families and kill breadwinners.

So is the staggering H.I.V. rate, which has created millions of orphans who must work to survive, and has forced millions more to work to support dying parents. In Zambia alone, a 2002 study by independent researchers for the United Nations concluded that AIDS had boosted the number of child laborers by up to 30 percent.

So is the region’s population explosion. Well over 4 in 10 people here are under age 15, compared with fewer than 2 in 10 in the developed world, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research organization.

With economic growth lagging births, manual labor is often the only way the newcomers can feed themselves.

Worldwide, the number of children who were already “economically active” by the age of 14 fell roughly 10 percent from 2000 to 2004, to about 191 million, according to the International Organization for Labor, a United Nations agency.

More impressive still, the number of young children laboring in the most dangerous jobs dropped by a third.

In Asia, the number of economically active children — meaning they worked beyond their chores, legally or not — dropped by five million in just four years.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the decline was even more drastic, nearly 12 million. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa was the only region where the number of working children did not fall.

“It’s like trying to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon while the tap is running,” said Birgitte Poulsen, the technical specialist for the International Labor Organization in Zambia. “If you want to tackle this, you have to recognize the magnitude of the problem, not just in terms of its size, but its complexity. It isn’t just due to instability and conflict and war. It’s poverty and H.I.V.-AIDS.”

Echoes of Oliver Twist

If the stereotype of child labor is an Oliver Twist world of sweatshops with youngsters hunched over sewing machines or metal presses, Africa’s reality is different.

A handful of Zambia’s child workers are clearly exploited by adults — for prostitution in cities, and perhaps as miners in the emerald-rich north, near the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The International Labor Organization says there are increasing reports of Zambian children being trafficked for work in construction and farming and as servants.

Overwhelmingly, though, what drives children into work is not greed but privation. Young people here largely work to feed themselves or their parents, or both.

Alone — a family name, like many in this part of the world, drawn from the English language — and his grandmother rise at about 6:30 a.m.

After washing, they make the half-hour walk to the quarry where they work, under a plastic tarp mounted on scavenged tree branches.

Alone describes his day in the most basic English: “I break the rocks. I get up early in the morning, before the sun rises. For breakfast, I drink tea sometimes. This morning, I didn’t eat. I’m hungry.”

After two hours, he walks to Tatwasha Basic School, a state-run institution near his home, for about four hours of classes.

Tatwasha, a grid of cinder-block buildings set on a yellow dirt courtyard, has 3,000 students. About 300 work in the quarries.

Maureen Chinjenge, the school’s stern headmistress, has a word for the quarry children: disoriented.

“Most of these children are orphans,” she said, “and in most cases, their performance is not good. For the most part, they don’t eat breakfast, and coming to classes they don’t concentrate. Things like clothing, they don’t have any, and the other children make fun of them.”

Their attendance, she says, is spotty. Many are latecomers; some first-graders are as old as 11.

Alone, a second-grader at age 9, fits that template well. Asked his teacher’s name, he fidgets for fully a minute, then answers ruefully, “I don’t remember.”

After school, he returns to the quarry where, sitting cross-legged on the ground, he attacks his pile of rocks for five more hours, until sunset.

A scab marked his left cheek, damage from a sliver of quartz-like rock that flew into his face after an especially hard strike.

Other stone-crushers complain of broken fingers, impaired vision or a “heavy chest,” an early sign of silicosis, but Alone says he has suffered no serious injuries beyond some smashed fingers and cut eyes.

“It’s a hard job; I hurt myself sometimes,” he said, but “I measure my size. I don’t break huge amounts. I do it according to my age.”

Beyond the physical cruelty and lost youth, sub-Saharan Africa’s child laborers are social and economic millstones on a region that can ill afford them.

They are poorly educated, badly fed, inadequately supervised by adults and far more likely to become illiterates whose children, like them, will toil in fields, tend roadside stands or crush rocks.

Already, a number of studies have documented increases in street children in sub-Saharan cities, many of them AIDS orphans forced into sidewalk vending, theft or selling sex to survive.

In Lusaka, a city of 1.2 million, “I don’t think it would come to more than 50,000, but the number is definitely growing,” said Yvonne Chilufya, a project manager for Jesus Cares Ministries, a Zambian organization that assists street children and other child laborers.

“We see a lot of child-headed households as a result of H.I.V.,” she added. “In other cases, you find the parents are both alive, but doing nothing, chronically ill. So the children are taking care of the parents. The parents send the children out to find food.”

The last time Zambia’s government counted, in 1999, it found nearly 600,000 child laborers between ages 5 and 17, roughly 9 in 10 of them on farms, the rest in the cities, working as vendors, domestics or laborers.

Almost all were unpaid. On paper, at least, most were illegal: Zambian law forbids labor by children under 13, and allows those between 13 and 15 to engage only in light work.

Zambia also has signed the two international conventions that set minimum ages for work and outlaw the most harmful forms of child labor.

In recent years, its news media have begun to expose dangerous working conditions for children, and its government has started to move against the most outlandish forms of labor.

But as elsewhere in Africa, Zambia’s stifling bureaucracy, its poverty, the AIDS epidemic and the sheer size of the task all work against success.

Ms. Poulsen, of the International Labor Organization, says the government’s efforts to weed out child labor would be reasonably good “if you have inspectors, cars and fuel.” Zambia has precious little of each.

“We’ve got lots and lots of good policies in this country,” she said. “But there’s no coordination. It’s difficult to staff basic social services — schools, clinics — because people keep dying” of AIDS.

Choosing a Way to Die

Chola J. Chabala, the Zambian assistant labor commissioner and the official charged with reducing child labor, says the number of children who work is growing despite his government’s efforts, especially in rural areas where oversight is weak.

“I do this job with a passion, but it is very depressing at the end of the day,” he said. “I’ve heard children who work as prostitutes say they would rather die from AIDS, because it is slower than dying of hunger.”

Crushing stone is ranked in international agreements as one of the worst forms of child labor, full of risks from flying rock fragments, misdirected hammers, repetitive motion injuries and years of inhaling dust.

Like prostitution, it is a job undertaken for survival, not profit.

Mrs. Chilufya, of Jesus Cares Ministries, says that in the last four years her group has taken close to 1,000 children from the quarries, placing them in the organization’s own schools and giving small loans to parents and caretakers to open more sustainable businesses, like roadside groceries.

But Lusaka has three major quarries, and although hundreds of children have been rescued and sent to schools, hundreds more have taken their place.

The quarries are sprawling outcrops of limestone or quartz-like rock that are hand-mined by hundreds of itinerants armed with hammers, shovels and sledges.

In places, they have dug as much as 20 feet below the surface, leaving lattices of surface paths between pits of algae-clogged rainwater, washbasins for the workers’ laundry.

The quarries have their own economy. Men split boulders into smaller chunks, then sell them by the barrow to women whose families reduce them to gravel and powder.

Homeless and unsupervised children, roaming the streets, hire themselves out at about 30 cents a day to help with the crushing.

The output goes on display beside highways — waist-high piles of gravel; old cement bags packed with crushed stone or powder. Construction crews buy the rocks and powder, then sell the cement bags back to the rock breakers.

It is a tiring, endlessly tedious task. Its practitioners work six and seven days a week, and they make almost nothing.

Fifty-year-old Ms. Mulelema and her grandson Alone live in Lusaka’s Chawama neighborhood, a slum of one- and two-room block houses linked by dirt paths, in a single room, perhaps 8 by 12 feet.

A sheet draped over a rope separates a grimy foam sofa and two wooden chairs from a rudimentary kitchen.

There is no electricity.

Pencils of sunshine streaming through holes in the corrugated asbestos roof supply the only light.

Nor is there a toilet; the stench of human waste wafts upward from bushes outside.

Water is hauled in from a community tap.

Mrs. Mulelema sleeps on the sofa. Alone sleeps on the concrete floor. Stenciled in black on the wall is a diamond, one word at each angle, comprising a homily: “God Bless Us All.”

Alone has been living with his grandmother since his mother died in 2001. His father is a mystery.

“I saw him once, but it was long ago,” his grandmother said. “It’s just Alone, and I am taking care of him.”

Alone is a handsome boy, with large brown eyes and close-cropped hair, but clearly malnourished.

He is short enough — a bit under four feet — to be mistaken for a 6- or 7-year-old.

He has two pairs of pants, his skateboard sweatshirt and a pair of black leather shoes, which he reserves for school, the soles so worn that his toes hang out the front.

Hungry, but Paying the Rent

The two or three bags of rock powder that Alone can produce, at 10,000 kwacha per bag, are sold as a mixer for concrete, often to line swimming pools for Lusaka’s wealthier residents.

They are the most lucrative products his grandmother offers, almost enough to pay the $11 a month she needs for rent and access to the community water tap.

Sales of the gravel she produces earn barely enough money to buy corn meal and small, dried fish, called kapenta, that the two eat for dinner.

For Mrs. Mulelema, Alone is literally the difference between profit and loss, and a hair’s-breadth difference at that.

“We don’t eat breakfast every day,” she said. “At lunch we have sweet potatoes, and then we wait for supper.

“If I decide to have my breakfast, it means I won’t have anything for supper.”

Mrs. Mulelema once tried to open a food stand in the community market, but could not raise the cash.

Like virtually all the hundreds of Lusakans who crush stones, she says she does it because she has no choice.

“The business has no profit,” said Mwila Zulu, a 40-year-old mother of three girls. She has been crushing stone at a quarry in Lusaka’s industrial zone since the police shut down her unlicensed vegetable stand in the city’s downtown in 2002.

Mrs. Zulu’s husband died last year with symptoms that pointed to AIDS. Her daughters work at the quarry after school ends at noon, trying to fill the space he left. The youngest, Kunda and Mercy, break rocks with ball-peen hammers, the handles cut down to fit their hands.

By day’s end, their deep brown arms and faces wear a film of white quartz-like dust.

They are 7 and 8 years old.

“She started working with me in recent years,” Mrs. Zulu said of Kunda. “She couldn’t do anything when she was young, but now she’s grown, so she’s helping me.”

For 50,000 kwacha, or $15, a passing construction worker can buy a chest-high heap of gravel that took them three weeks to render.

But sales of that size are infrequent, sometimes once every two or three weeks, and money is short.

Mrs. Zulu said she did not waste time fretting over her daughters’ fate.

“If I feel pity for them,” she said, “what are they going to eat?”

(Gavin du Venage contributed reporting from Sedgefield, South Africa, for this article.)


4. Sen. Obama Seen As Inspiration in Kenya
By ANTHONY MITCHELL (from Forbes.com)

Barack Obama may have only landed Thursday for his latest visit to his father's homeland, but the U.S. senator is already become the country's most prominent "citizen."

People drinking a Kenyan beer called Senator are ordering "Obama" instead. Obama's photograph is popping up on T-shirts, and the once knee-high grass in his ancestral village was cut in advance of his arrival.

As the only African-American in the U.S. Senate, Obama is seen as an inspiration in this east African country where more than half its 33 million people eke out a living on less than $1 a day.

Obama arrived Thursday for a six-day visit, and planned to meet with President Mwai Kibaki and stop at the site where Nairobi's U.S. embassy was bombed in 1998, killing 248 people.

The Illinois Democrat, his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia, 8, and Sasha, 4, were greeted at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi by U.S. Ambassador Michael E. Ranneberger, the embassy said.

Just an hour after his plane touched down, Obama's arrival was making headline news on the country's leading television stations and local journalists chased his entourage as it left the airport.

"Village beats the drums for returning son" declared the Daily Nation newspaper, the most widely read in Kenya.

In Nyangoma-Kogelo, a tiny village tucked away in the rural west where chickens roam free and tiny boys in rags tend their flocks, residents have been preparing for weeks for Obama's return. Local newspapers reported that the dirt road leading to his 85-year-old grandmother's house was leveled.

Local media reported that Sarah Hussein, who will have to communicate with Obama through an interpreter, will treat him just like any other grandchild.

The senator grew up in Hawaii with his American mother after his parents divorced. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently in the early 1990s to introduce his then-fiancee to his Kenyan family. This is his first trip to Kenya since being sworn into office as a U.S. senator.

The senator's father, also named Barack Obama, became a university lecturer in Uganda after studying economics at Harvard University. He then worked in Kenya's private sector before joining the treasury department, where he became a senior economist.

He died in a car crash in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter. One son died in 1984 and all his surviving children, except one, live in Britain or the United States.

Obama's paternal grandfather, Onyango Hussein Obama, was one of the first Muslim converts in the village.

During the senator's visit, he plans to take a public HIV test at a clinic in Nyangoma-Kogelo in an effort to promote AIDS prevention in a country where 700 people die on average per day from HIV/AIDS.

Although there have been recent declines in the amount of people infected with the virus in Kenya, two million people out of a total population of 33 million are infected. Around 1.5 million people have died from the disease - and western parts of the country are the worst hit.

After his visit to Kenya, Obama is headed to Djibouti and Chad. He began his African tour Sunday with a visit to Nelson Mandela's former prison at Robben Island. He has met with black businessmen, AIDS victims and U.S. Embassy officials, among others.

He paid tribute to South Africans' fight for freedom, saying they taught lessons to the world and helped inspire his own political career.

Aides said Wednesday that Obama had scrapped plans to visit Congo and Rwanda at the request of the U.S. Embassy in Congo because of postelection fighting in that country's capital, Kinshasa.


5. Africa: ask the women
To address Africa's deep-rooted problems, it's time to reject the superficial male charisma embodied by the likes of Tony Blair and Bob Geldof and instead mobilise the dynamic energies of African and Africa-engaged women.
By Patricia Daniel

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, is not content to abandon any part of the world in his search for a global political role. A year after the Commission for Africa , in which he played a central part, he has returned to the subject by announcing in June 2006 the establishment of an "independent panel for Africa" designed to monitor progress of the commission's recommendations and to advise on "the problems facing Africa".

There are many possible objections to this latest consultative exercise: its motivation, its mandate, its likely effectiveness . There is, however, a less obvious but equally important issue: its personnel. If such a panel is thought necessary, who should – and should not – be on it? To approach the proposal in this way is also to understand that little thought is expended on this and similar initiatives.

Africa: a handful of problems

The problems of Africa were extensively documented in the 461-page report of the 2005 commission, the product of consultation and analysis by a high-profile multinational group. A year on, the core realities facing the continent are unchanged. In short, most informed observers are already fully aware of the five main issues at stake - and so should Tony Blair:

Trade: Despite numerous extensions since 2001 and a last-ditch attempt at the G8 summit in St Petersburg to persuade all sides to make concessions, the World Trade Organisation's Doha round has failed to reach an agreement that could have protected and helped develop markets for poorer countries.

George Monbiot pointed out in June 2005 that a 5% increase in developing countries' share of world exports would earn them an extra $350bn a year – three times more than they will receive in development aid by 2015 at the current rate of pledges.

This possibility has been scuppered by the European Union's resistance to cutting tariffs and the United States's refusal to cut domestic farm subsidies or stop dumping cheap exports (while these blocs put pressure on India, Brazil and China to reduce tariffs protecting their own markets for industrial goods). Tony Blair , whose country held the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2005 – and whose close ally Peter Mandelson is the EU's trade commissioner – must be well aware of this particular problem.

Conflict: A Whitehall consultation document published in 2001, concluded that "conflict in Africa is caused by inequality and economic decline … it has resulted in as many deaths each year as are caused by epidemic diseases and has uprooted millions of people … it requires a stronger and more focused international effort." Yet inter-ethnic conflict, which spills over into neighbouring countries, continues in Sudan, Congo, Somalia. These conflicts are fuelled by the unregulated arms trade, in which the US, France and Britain are the largest exporters.

West African countries have now declared a moratorium on small arms. However, the attempt by the UN review conference in July 2006 to reach a global agreement was aborted by a handful of countries (the United States to the fore) that saw control as "a national rather than an international issue". The Mali Red Cross commented: "The international community has developed various human rights agreements, but when it comes to the international trade in arms, these principles are often relegated to second place in order to serve economic and political interests" (see Volontariat 8/2005).

Corruption: The Commission for Africa report highlights the problems arising from weak central government and a weak civil service, along with the need for support to build technical capacity, transparent systems and accountability mechanisms in order to ensure the absorption and effective use of development-aid funding.

An approach widely recognised as effective here is the strategic placement of European Commission experts in government finance and planning departments. The Commonwealth secretariat also provides legal experts to help draft model laws, counter money-laundering, prosecute for bribery and define parameters on judicial integrity, as well as investigating the recovery of assets of illicit origin.

Britain has given £1 million to Transparency International to support its work with civil society in holding governments to account. But corruption is certainly not only an issue confined to Africa: in the peer review of the OECD anti-bribery convention, France and Canada examined Britain's own record and were very critical about loopholes in corporate liability.

HIV/Aids: The attempt to strengthen national systems in Africa continues to be thwarted by the high incidence of HIV/Aids which is thinning out cohort after cohort of dynamic young professionals. The disease has a particular effect on the education of the next generation – pupils and teachers suffer directly or are forced to spend time caring for family members, enduring the trauma of loss and coping with social stigma as well as economic privation.

Even though antiretroviral drugs now exist, western pharmaceutical companies have refused to release generic patents to enable developing countries to produce their own treatment. Moreover, the US's "abstinence-only" approach to HIV prevention has led to a serious shortage of condoms in severely affected countries such as Zambia and Uganda .

Gender inequality: The continuing contravention of the rights of women, which leads to poverty, prostitution and lack of power over the use of condoms (if they are available) is a key factor in the spread of HIV/Aids. A key indicator of the low status of women is the perpetuation of female genital mutilation (FGM), whose incidence in some countries (Mali is one) nears 100%.

The Maputo protocol calling for the legal prosecution of the practice is now being officially accepted by individual governments, but eradicating it remains a huge challenge. FGM is the cause of severe lifelong health problems, which reinforce the obligatory household chores of millions of rural women: fetching water and firewood or pounding grain with a heavy pestle. Together, these mean that many African women simply don't have enough energy to sustain a collective struggle for their rights or play an equal part in development.

A pale panel

To address and advise on these five areas, Tony Blair has selected a panel of "experts" whose so-far-announced membership has three notable characteristics:
they are all ageing men
they belong to a western(ised) international elite
none of them are development professionals.

Among the existing appointees are:

Kofi Annan: the United Nations's secretary-general , is held in high esteem throughout Europe and has been much honoured by academic institutions. Yet his voice has consistently been shown to be ineffective, especially as regards conflict situations – Iraq, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo and now Lebanon and the middle east.

Kofi Annan has made no real stand on behalf of the rest of the world against United States hegemony, fearing that direct confrontation will threaten the future of the UN ; his voice, for example, was not heard at all against the refusal by US authorities to provide visas for Cuban representatives to attend the UN sixtieth anniversary summit in New York in September 2005.

At the same time, the reforms he has proposed will remain hard to implement, because countries in the global south are afraid that their logic will be to make the United Nations an instrument of the United States.

The UN leader, now approaching the end of his nine-year term, has been far more familiar on the international circuit than in grassroots development in his native Africa, listening to what ordinary people have to say.

Bill Gates: he probably possesses the vision, entrepreneurial drive and money to make a successful effort to address preventable diseases (such as malaria) in Africa. Indeed, it is possible that private philanthropists can do this more directly and effectively than G8 governments, hamstrung as the latter are by their own multiple agendas.

However, as a powerful member of the private sector, Gates has not raised his voice to influence US policymaking, to lobby against pharmaceutical firms on anti-retroviral drug patents or to protest against the suspension of condom sales to countries like Uganda.

It is also interesting that he has not put his information and communication technology (ICT) skills at Africa's disposal, but rather chosen an area where he admits to lacking expertise. ICT can provide valuable support for government management and communication systems, to enable countries to do their own development. In addition, it has been increasingly shown to be a key factor in the promotion of health, education, human rights and conflict prevention, especially for rural populations – through facilitation of distance learning, access to information and civil-society networking. Even more interesting is the fact that Bill Gates attempted to underwrite the roll-out of ICT infrastructure in China (a much more lucrative market) at a time when the EU is pursuing Microsoft for unpaid taxes.

Bob Geldof: the pop musician and entrepreneur is driven by good intentions based on a rather simplistic understanding: if we send more money, a miracle will happen and Africa will be saved. His lack of any real socio-political analysis of the problems, and of what makes people poor, was revealed in the BBC's 2005 series Geldof in Africa.

It showed Geldof travelling through several countries, observing, sitting under the stars and reflecting on the "the most beautiful and luminous place on earth". In Mali, he followed the tourist trail: libraries in Timbuktu, the mosque at Djènné, the cave dwellings of Bandiagara. The only Malian we heard speak directly in the programme was a member of the slave class. It is true that slavery still prevails, but it is far less widespread than female genital mutilation: it is limited to some of the Tuareg tribes and is in no way representative of the majority of Mali's population, who generally share good inter-ethnic and cross-border relations. Even less does a focus on slavery provide any explanation of the causes of poverty in Mali.

This embarrassment follows Geldof's promotion of the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park in 2005 which – despite his professed love for all things African – recruited only western artists like Madonna, and relegated true musicians from Mali and Togo to a hastily-arranged, afterthought event in Cornwall's Eden Project.

The real thing

Instead of this motley crew, I should like to propose a panel of real experts: seven African women with their feet on the ground, and two other women with a commitment to African concerns. This is actually not a difficult task as there are so many to choose from. Like Tony Blair's it seems, this list came off the top of my head, without needing to reach for my address book. That very fact is a small indication of the richness of experience and expertise there is to choose from – which is being so shamefully neglected.

Wangari Maathai: Kenya's deputy environment minister, won the Nobel peace prize in 2004 for her innovative Green Belt Movement campaign to plant thousands of trees across Africa to slow deforestation. The movement grew to include projects to preserve biodiversity, educate people about their environment and promote the rights of women and girls.

Since the majority of conflicts in Africa arise over the fight for scarce resources, especially between farmer and herder groups, protection of the environment is a key factor in preserving the peace. Wangari's contribution, in the words of the Nobel prize committee: "combined science, social engagement and politics, both locally and internationally".

Aminata Traoré: a well-known Malian activist, former minister for tourism and culture, and ex-resident representative for the UN in Mali. Today, she leads the Coalition for African Alternatives to Debt and Development (Cad) and is most famous recently for writing an open letter to the president of France.

In the wings of the 2005 France-Africa summit, she organised an alternative citizens summit, during which gourds were lined along the street and smashed one by one – an African metaphor for France-Africa relations: "empty vessels make most noise". In July 2006 she ran the fifth alternative G8 in Gao, northern Mali, which was attended by over 600 people from Africa, Europe and the US. This provided the chance for farmers, women and young people to discuss global issues themselves. A key actor too in the World Social Forum, Aminata's motto is always: "another world is possible".

Thokozile Ruzvidzo: works in the economic commission for Africa's Centre for Gender and Development in Addis Ababa, and has pioneered the development of the Africa gender and development index (AGDI). This tool for mapping the extent of gender inequality in Africa and assessing government performance was piloted in twelve countries in 2005. The pilot confirmed the strong relation between policy implementation and improvements in the situation of women.

The involvement of the African Union is an important factor, for example in peer reviews. "In Nepad, we are naming and shaming at a higher level – for the first time gender is on their agenda", Thokozile told a meeting of Commonwealth women's affairs ministers in New York in February 2006.

Marie Tamoifo Nkom: a militant lawyer from Cameroon, who was chosen as the spokesperson for the first ever African Youth Forum, held in Bamako (Mali) in November 2005 in the wings of the France-Africa summit. The manifesto she presented to the heads of state of Africa and France in December 2005 highlighted the urgent need to address the issues of youth unemployment, HIV/Aids, migration and the involvement of young people in democratic processes.

There is a clear relationship between neglect of youth issues and increasing conflict. Marie's address ended with this warning: "If politics don't take care of youth, the wind of change will lead youth to take care of politics."

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: a former vice-president of the World Bank and successively finance and foreign minister of Nigeria (who resigned from the latter position on 3 August 2006), whose country is ranked second on Transparency International's global corruption perceptions index. She says she is detested by some of her compatriots who have previously benefited from oil revenues and see her as a "problem woman" for diverting the money into providing clean water for the population.

Despite opposition, Ngozi had begun to reverse decades of economic mismanagement. Before her departure from government she had, through good housekeeping, facilitated a formal credit rating for her country by international bond agencies for the first time.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf: Africa's first woman head of state, after winning free and fair elections in November 2005 to become president of Liberia. She would probably be too busy to take part in a panel to advise on Africa's problems. But a further twenty African women opinion-makers, with influence in political, economic and cultural spheres are celebrated in the magazine Jeune Afrique (Number 2356 / 2006); and there are plenty more female experts available.

Rosalind Eyben: a former development policy advisor who became head of Britain's department for international development (DfID) office in Bolivia in 2002 and now works as a researcher. She has an informed view on the need to hold donors to account ; in particular, she argues against the over-arching policy instrument for the aid system – the poverty-reduction strategy paper – which was developed by (mainly male) economists at the world summit on social development at Copenhagen in 1995.

The gender-equality agenda, developed six months later at the fourth world conference on women in Beijing, provided a different framework. But this agenda became invisible within the mainstream of donor-driven aid instruments and development targets. Rosalind regrets that the international community passed up the chance to "take the road less travelled … which would mean engagement with the concepts of society, culture and power that could help us interpret human action and support transformative processes for social justice"'.

Mary Robinson: the first woman president of Ireland who became the UN high commissioner for human rights. She is now president of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative, which supports good governance and capacity-building in developing countries, and honorary president of Oxfam International. Her range of expertise and engagement, as well as her forward thinking about human rights in the age of globalisation, make her an appropriate choice for the alternative Africa panel.

Betty Mould-Iddrisu: leads the legal and constitutional affairs division of the Commonwealth secretariat. An important figure and role: but it is not always necessary to seek out high-profile women in order to access sound practical analysis.

In its response to the Commission for Africa report, the Mothers' Union highlights the fact that it pays mere lip-service to the role of civil society, has an exclusive focus on government-government partnerships and overlooks the need for gender equality and human rights to be integral to the development process: "Such gaps are less likely to have been missing if the Commission had included people from the grassroots of Africa and in particular more women."

A time for women

The 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles annexed the Make Poverty History lobby and was hailed as a landmark for development to Africa – but it really just heralded more of the same. Hilary Benn, then as now Britain's minister for international development, has talked of the need to harness the popular commitment generated by Live 8.

But "so much goodwill among so many people" is not enough. Good faith among G8 governments would be a better start. They claim that they will "(turn) talk into action", but Glenys Kinnock points out that "(Britain), along with many other donor countries, have been found guilty of creative accountancy" (see "EU efforts to fight poverty are not adding up", Guardian, 19 June 2006).

It is time to stop being impressed by superficial male charisma. It doesn't deliver. Addressing Africa's problems requires genuine expertise, courage and creativity. Above all, it is time to call a halt to the usual male approach to solutions which can be summed up as follows: if something doesn't work, carry on doing it, just do more of the same, it has to work eventually. All evidence is to the contrary. For a real change in Africa, let's just ask the women – to come up with the answers and to put them into practice.

(Patricia Daniel is senior lecturer in social development at the Centre for International Development and Training, University of Wolverhampton, England. She is currently involved in a study on gender, peace and stability in Mali, in collaboration with the University of Bamako and the Centre for Democracy and Development in Lagos.)


6. Exclusive: The Pentagon Plans for an African Command
The Pentagon is close to approving a command for Africa, where poverty and corruption make it a vulnerable area for extremists and terrorists
By SALLY B. DONNELLY (from Time.com)

In what may be the most glaring admission that the U.S. military needs to dramatically readjust how it will fight what it calls 'the long war,' the Pentagon is expected to announce soon that it will create an entirely new military command to focus on the globe's most neglected region: Africa.

Pentagon sources say that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is close to approving plans for an African Command, which would establish a military organization to singlehandedly deal with the entire continent of Africa. It would be a sign of a significant strategic shift in administration policy, reflecting the need to put more emphasis on pro-active, preventative measures rather than maintaining a defensive posture designed for the Cold War.

The Pentagon has five geographic Unified Combatant Commands around the world and responsibility for Africa is awkwardly divided among three of those: European Command, Pacific Command and Central Command — which is also responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Creating an African Command would be an important structural move to coordinate US defense policy for the continent, as well as provide a single military organization for agencies like the State Department and the CIA to work with in the region.

A defense source says the new command, which is part of Rumsfeld's ongoing worldwide reassessment of the military's division of labor, may be headed by Gen. William 'Kip' Ward, a respected officer who is the Army's only four star African-American general. Ward has boots-on-the-ground experience in Africa: he was a commander during the U.S.'s ill-fated mission in Somalia in 1993 and also served as a military representative in Egypt in 1998. Ward is currently the deputy commander at European Command, and as such oversees US military relations with 43 African countries.

But a former military officer who thinks highly of Ward nonetheless says creating an entirely new command compounds an existing problem. " The size and number of headquarters already is skewed too far in favor of 'tail' at the expense of warfighting 'teeth.' Want to increase 'boots on the ground?' Eliminate or downsize some of these staffs, don't create more," says this observer.

Many military experts have long advocated paying more attention to Africa. While Central Command has had a small military contingent based in Djibouti (called Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa or 'CJTF-HOA') for several years, intelligence agencies and military officers have warned that the US should be spending more time and money in Africa.

Gen. John Abizaid, the Centcom commander, laid out a laundry list of concerns to the Senate Armed Services Committee last March. While Abizaid spoke about the Horn of Africa, the threats stretch across much of the continent. "The Horn of Africa is vulnerable to penetration by regional extremist groups, terrorist activity, and ethnic violence. Al Qaeda has a history of planning, training for, and conducting major terrorist attacks in this region, such as the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The volatility of this region is fueled by a daunting list of challenges, to include extreme poverty, corruption, internal conflicts, border disputes, uncontrolled borders and territorial waters, weak internal security capabilities, natural disasters, famine, lack of dependable water sources, and an underdeveloped infrastructure. The combination of these serious challenges creates an environment that is ripe for exploitation by extremists and criminal organizations."

Abizaid did point out that small operation in Djibouti has produced bang for the buck: "Working closely with U.S. Embassy personnel in the region, CJTF-HOA assists partner governments in building indigenous capacity to deny terrorists access to their territory. This not only includes training local security and border forces, but also involves assisting with low-level civic projects throughout HOA such as digging wells, building schools and distributing books, and holding medical and veterinary clinics in remote villages." These efforts, Abizaid said, engender goodwill and help "discredit extremist propaganda and bolster local desires and capabilities to defeat terrorists before they can become entrenched."


7. Uganda: Government and Rebels Sure of an End to 20-Year Conflict

Both the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.) were upbeat on Monday about a peaceful end to their 20-year-old war that has killed thousands and displaced almost two million people in the north of the country.

The signing on Saturday of an agreement to cease hostilities gave both sides new hope that a comprehensive agreement was in sight, although they acknowledged the need for continued vigilance.

"In spite of a rocky start to the talks, there is currently an unprecedented will from both sides to reach an agreement. We are confident of reaching an agreement, though there are still a few things we do not agree on, but we see a better rapport, we see more commitment and all of us agree on the need to have peace in northern Uganda," the head of the Ugandan delegation to the talks, Ruhakana Rugunda, the interior minister, said on Sunday.

His L.R.A. counterpart, Martin Ojul, agreed, telling IRIN by phone from Juba, southern Sudan, where the talks are being held: "Hopefully, the government will [consolidate] the cessation of hostilities agreement, but the L.R.A. is more committed to this process than ever before. We are committed to the process, however long it may take."

In the next round of talks, according to analysts in Kampala, the mediators will have to find a compromise, especially to L.R.A. demands that include huge cuts in the military, L.R.A. representation in all political appointments, and total autonomy of northern Uganda.

Other sensitive issues will include wealth- and power-sharing as well as the economic and social development of northern Uganda.

Rugunda agreed, saying the next three weeks would be crucial to the process as rebels start assembling in two areas in southern Sudan, but he was hopeful that a compromise such as that reached during the debate on halting hostilities would also be reached on other outstanding issues.

The Ugandan government and L.R.A. on Saturday signed an agreement to cease hostilities effective from Aug. 29. Rugunda said the process would require all stakeholders, including the Ugandan population, to be vigilant. "There are still suspicions and we should not give detractors a chance to exploit any weak points that may show in the implementation of the agreement," he said.

The truce calls for the safe passage of L.R.A. forces to two sites designated as assembly points, one at Owiny-ki-Bul in Sudan's eastern Equatoria on the east side of the Nile, for those rebels in southern Sudan and in Uganda, and another for those in the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.) at Ri-Kwangba in western Equatoria to the west of the Nile.

Those fighters in Uganda who cannot move to southern Sudan are allowed to assemble in any place of worship in Uganda, according to the agreement.

"The forces of the L.R.A. shall surface wherever they may be present … places of worship in Uganda, designated in consultation with religious leaders, may serve as sanctuary for the L.R.A. forces," the agreement states.

L.R.A.'s second in command, Vincent Otti, called a local radio in the northern Uganda town of Gulu on Sunday to urge L.R.A. fighters to respect the cessation of hostilities deal, saying it was "real."

"Do not abduct people or steal food. If you want food, ask the community. Do not commit atrocities and no ambushes as you move," Otti said on MEGA FM, a semi-official broadcaster. He said he had spoken to L.R.A. commanders who were expected to lead their forces to the two designated assembly areas in southern Sudan.

In the past, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni had maintained that the ceasefire should only be part of a final deal as the rebels had used such opportunities to re-arm and recruit new fighters.

A legislator from northern Uganda, Jimmy Akena, who had attended part of the talks before Saturday's breakthrough, said there was mistrust between the two groups, "but they all agree that there is a need for peace and they are only haggling on how that peace should be delivered."

What was not clear was what would happen to the assembled rebel fighters in case the two parties failed to reach a final agreement. "In the unlikely event of failure of the peace talks, the L.R.A. shall be allowed to leave the assembly areas peacefully. The possibility of failing is a bit unlikely," Rugunda said.

During the next round of talks, the truce will be reviewed biweekly as the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army will look after the rebels.

A truce-monitoring group led by the southern Sudan government will comprise two members from the L.R.A. and two each from the Ugandan government and the African Union. They are supposed to be in Juba by Tuesday to begin monitoring the implementation of the agreement.

The Juba negotiations are seen as the best bet to end the two-decades-long conflict in northern Uganda that has since spread to southern Sudan and the northeastern D.R.C.

Tens of thousands have been killed and nearly two million displaced in northern Uganda since the L.R.A. took over leadership of a regional rebellion among the Acholi tribesmen in what relief agencies say is the world's worst and most-forgotten humanitarian crisis. © IRIN